What we can’t learn from history

James Hester, who has a fascinating practice applying lessons from history, has recently turned his attention to the problem of sustainability. First he started looking for sources, some of which I could help him with, and then we had a long conversation over Twitter, which stands out in my mind as one of the few instances when I’ve been really frustrated with that medium. Although we do have substantive differences in outlook, values, and beliefs about the world, I couldn’t help but think we were talking past each other far more because of the need to be pithy about huge complex topics than we would have done in person or in long form text. So I’ve been meaning to blog about this, and I was glad to see that he beat me to it, because his post—“The journey of a million years begins with a single step”—sets the context well.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing (but you should), the gist is that he’s looking for examples from history of societies that met these three criteria:

All humans have unrestricted access to the basic necessities of survival (space, food, shelter/cover, freedom of movement, and company of other humans).

All humans maintain a balance in their way of living such that their existence does not become toxic to themselves or their environment.

All humans are unable or unwilling (or both) to alter their way of living in such a way that would violate points 1 and/or 2.

I think part of our disagreement comes from a difference in ambition: where James’s first point is limited to necessities, broadly defined, I am interested in minimising human suffering and maximising thriving. That means I’m not willing to accept the two easiest lessons history can teach us: that this problem would be easier to solve if we had a mass die-off first, and that it could be solved by going back to the stone age and imposing extremely tight technological limitations on what humans can do. I am not convinced that there are any examples from history that don’t violate either those requirements or one of James’s 3, though I would love to be proved wrong.

A particularly big challenge for applying lessons from history in this context is that our situation is so unprecedented. We are the first truly global civilisation, in the sense that no-one gets to be untouched by it. A select few, in North Korea and the few remaining “uncontacted” tribes in Papua New Guinea, inland South America and the Andaman Islands get to not directly interact with the world civilisation, but we now have the ability to completely use up and destroy resources on a global scale, and that means no-one can escape the consequences.

Until relatively recently, the closest analogy for this was isolated island civilisations, because everyone else had some kind of external pressures and/or escape valves. For example, the native people of the Puget Sound seemed to live pretty well in balance with the constraints of their local environment, but their situation had some significant differences from today’s world civilisation. This is an extremely biologically productive region—much more so than the world on average—they still had plenty of trade with people outside the region, and they had downward population pressure from local warfare and Haida slave raids. We don’t get to trade beyond this planet, we have to contend with the overall productivity of the entire planet, and random episodes of violent deaths and disappearances are a price I’m unwilling to accept for ecological sustainability.

If we do start looking at isolated islands, well the first obvious tale is that Easter Island, which had overreached its natural resources so badly that its population had almost died out when Europeans arrived. Iceland managed to stop short of that complete disaster, but it came pretty close and its people were hungry and poor for most of its history; not so much a tale of human thriving as human stopping just short of the cliff edge. New Zealand looks like it might have been doing better until Captain Cook showed up, but the Māori had only arrived a few centuries earlier, hadn’t even really finished colonising the place themselves, they’d already driven over 30 species to extinction, and they fought repeated wars among themselves.

There are plenty of examples of human civilisations not consuming all of their resources because they simply didn’t have the technology or population to do so, but that seems to directly contradict at least my requirement of human thriving, if not James’s first condition about humans satisfying basic needs. And given the pervasiveness of human societies becoming so rapacious that they exhaust their natural resources as soon as they become able to, I think it takes some epic noble savage-ism to believe that other societies wouldn’t have done the same if the opportunity presented itself.

I do know of one intriguing example of an island civilisation stopping within its limits and maintaining a sort of material abundance for its people, though it’s another fatally flawed example: pre-colonial Hawaiʻi. One of the reasons I’m so generally fascinated with Hawaiʻi is that they seem to have figured out a way to maintain a steady-state population and economy within the very tight constraints of the water supply on some small islands. Their achievements were genuinely impressive. They had a watershed-based land ownership regime that aligned each chief’s interests with sensible stewardship of their most limited resource. They had an incredibly efficient combined aquaculture and intensive farming system along with rather clever methods for catching wild fish. They maintained their population right at the edge of what the land could safely support. Unfortunately, they achieved all this with a thoroughly autocratic, feudal system, in which each person had a pre-ordained role in society, the penalty for questioning that role was frequently death, and the birth rate was controlled by the aristocracy essentially getting to veto any contact between a commoner man and woman outside highly ritualised interactions. As impressed as I am with what they achieved, how they achieved it neither looks like the picture of thriving I’m after, nor like something that could possibly scale to a world of 7 billion people.

Now, my knowledge of history is far from comprehensive. There may be some better examples that I don’t know about, and I would love for you to tell me about them in the comments. But until I see some, the only sustainability lessons I can see from history are that we could solve the problem of resource over-exploitation by doing one or more of killing most of the world’s people, abandoning most of our technology, or instituting a hellishly autocratic world government. I don’t find any of these solutions remotely palatable, so we have an urgent need to come up with something new; something better than the world has seen before.

I’ve thought long and hard before responding to your post, as I wanted to make sure I did it justice.

First off, I just want to clarify something about my undertaking. This is a journey of curiosity, not one determined to prove a thesis. As I stated in the post, I have no idea if a group or society that fulfilled my criteria has ever existed, and I am fully prepared, having looked everywhere that I could, to discover that sadly it has not. So, I’m trying to be as methodical about the process as I can: start with a set of criteria, work backward in an attempt to match all the groups/societies I can find to that criteria, keep going as far back as I can until I hit bedrock, so to speak. This will take some serious time. This is quite possibly life’s work material.

Although this seems like a very utopian or idealistic task, I cannot help but feel that it is nonetheless an important one. If a way of living once existed (or perhaps still exists in one of the few indigenous societies left in the world) that resulted in no real damage to either other humans or to their environment, that strikes me as worth knowing. Even if we today are unable to completely emulate that way of living (and for any number of reasons that would probably be impractical), what would be useful to us are the perspectives and basic principles that resulted in such a way of living. We don’t have to completely adopt a new way of life in order to benefit from some of the lessons that that way may have to teach.

Equally worth knowing would be the opposite: that humanity has never ‘had it sorted’. Then at least we’d know. We’d know that whatever we have to do (because make no mistake, we have no choice at this point but to do something), we have to build it from scratch. Well, not even completely from scratch, because even lacking a ‘sorted’ society, the past is filled with useful lessons that can be helpful to us now. But before we know we have to do that, we have to dig back and find out what’s there.

As for the three criteria that I cite in my post, I consider them to be a draft of sorts. Just below my listing them I urge readers to sound off with suggested additions or amendments. My hope is that, going through the crucible of enough readers, we can arrive at a set of criteria that would be agreeable to all (or at least most). Noting your concerns, would you be willing to suggest alterations or additions?

I did not intend point #1 to refer to bare-bones needs in the just-scraping-by sense, but rather to the you-don’t-have-more-than-you-need sense. In other words, you have a dwelling, enough food, freedom to come and go as you will, and the support and companionship of others. There may be those who have more than this, but the important factor of #1 is that there is no one who has less than this. #1 is not the ‘just enough’ of poverty or a refugee camp, it is intended to be synonymous with thriving. Perhaps I can alter the wording to reflect this.

Hopefully I’m not straying into ‘noble savage-ism’, as that would be both naive of me and insulting to the peoples that I plan to research. What I’ve been trying to do is give societies the benefit of the doubt, that they wouldn’t misbehave with regards to themselves and their environment until they prove otherwise. We can, I think, all agree that these behaviours are, to use the technical term, foolish. So I think it only fair to start with the base assumption that no reasonable group of people would do such things until I find evidence to the contrary.

Lastly, let me assure you that I share many of the fears that you express in your response. I too dread the possibility that the responses I get back from those who have come before us will be ‘There are just too many of you’ or ‘People simply cannot be *that* free’. However, regardless of what we decide to do with the information we find, it is still important to find it and confront it. I’m not sure that our planet is concerned with what we want to be so, or what circumstances we are willing to accept. If it turns out that our flaw is overpopulation or too much technology, then that is the data. It is then up to us to decide how we respond to that. There is no guarantee we will like what we’re going to find. We don’t need to institute culls or enforce a pre-industrial existence, but we do need to confront, honestly, what facts we may find and then decide our best course of action.

I strongly suspect that this is just the beginning of a long conversation (as well it should be). I probably haven’t touched upon everything you wanted me to in this post. But hopefully I’ve at least helped to get the ball rolling. Please respond if you feel it necessary, and let’s keep this going.

Thank you for the considered reply, which confirms my suspicions that we were talking past each other on Twitter and that we’d do better in long form at lower speed. It’s now apparent to me that I had misunderstood two key aspects of the task you’re setting yourself:

1) I’d definitely read point 1 of the definition too narrowly. I think in your shoes I would write it a little differently; perhaps something like “all human beings can lead a basically comfortable life”, which to me at least is less evocative of a sort of refugee camp bare minimum requirements to stay alive. But this may just be a bias I have because I’ve spent enough time reading Vinay‘s ideas about just that sort of bare-bones survival….

2) I had taken your mission as implying that reverting to some previously-extant pattern was the only possibly solution to our crisis. In fairness to you, the end of your blog post ought to have made it pretty clear that this wasn’t your intention: I think this was purely a matter of my biases colouring my interpretation.

I should also clarify that I meant the reference to noble savage-ism more as a warning of one of the ways this kind of enquiry often goes wrong than a response to anything specific I’ve seen from you. Where I have seen that kind of fallacy is in the hippie romanticising of indigenous ways, so it makes me wary, especially because I am a bit of a hippie and do think we can learn a lot from the indigenous people of the “new” world, so I have to keep reminding myself of the limits that apply to that sort of thinking.

There is still some difference between us in emphasis, but it’s a rather subtler one: I’m still attached to the notion of going far beyond basics and having people really thrive, and I still think it’s technologically achievable if we could only figure out how to bring about the social and moral revolutions to get there. What I’m describing is a harder vision to achieve or find precedents for than yours, so really we’d better start with yours and then see if it can be taken further.

In terms of where to take this next, I must admit that I know a lot less about human history than I do about biology and particularly ecosystems, and it’s that latter body of knowledge that has me assuming we won’t find good historical examples. The short version of the argument is that ecosystems are generally held in balance by many different species limiting each others’ ability to grow out of control, and what that really means is limiting their population by killing them. Any example I can think of in biology where a species does get to run rampant for a while (e.g. the Pine Beetle across North America right now) ends with a population collapse because it used up the resources it was depending on. We humans have created an exceptional situation in which we’ve been able to step outside the usual rules for a few generations and our population has consequently exploded, but this is such an unprecedented event that if we’re going to avoid the malthusian crash scenario we need to come up with some thoroughly new ways of managing our resource use.

I’m actually not as pessimistic as this might make me sound, because we have some other unprecedented things going for us: I’m pretty sure we’re the only species ever to have the degree of self-awareness, sophisticated understanding of our impact on the world, and communication across the entire species that we do. That I’m still on balance a pessimist is mainly because I worry about our ability to put these to good use quickly enough in the face of widespread change resistance and various cognitive biases that enable that change resistance, but I do think we have a chance. And given that, I think that what you’re doing is thoroughly worthwhile, because any fragmentary lessons we could learn from history can still help; any pieces we get to reuse make building the whole easier.

As for where you should look, I strongly advise focussing on island civilisations, because in biological terms the closest thing to a precedent for humanity’s world domination is its local domination of isolated islands. If there turns out to be an equivalent of pre-colonial Hawai?i that didn’t have the crushing autocracy, that would be a case study we could learn a tremendous amount from, even if the technologies available to its people were dramatically different.